[Norfleet]

[quote]Originally posted by Anglachel:

Originally posted by Glock30:
[qb] I have been having fun with the following settings as asked by you.
1)Lord of Night: Air 4, Earth 4, Death 4, and Blood 5

Solid plan. The Lord of the Night is a good pretender, and he's an assassin....although his Fiends of Darkness may cause him to rout, like other accompanying towed rabble. At least fiends of Darkness are very MEAN towed guards. Oddly, I've never seen them rout the pretender in my usage of the LotN. Perhaps it has to do with that interesting bit about how if they all die, your pretender doesn't rout....fiends don't break, they always die....let me know what you find, okay?

2)Turmoil 3, Sloth 3, Heat 3, Growth 3 Luck 3, Magic 3

Mictlan only favors heat-1, and you'll suffer an economic hit for the excessive heat-3. I personally would go with heat-2, myself, due to the instability of temperature: Having a scale one-off hurts less than it appears.

Luck gives your very nice national heroes, which do a good job filling in missing magics, but your pretender has already covered the known Mictlan Earth/Air/Death holes. However, they're a little suboptimal for pure battle performance. You lose out on Quickness and Breath of Winter by lacking water-2, and BoW can clear out those pesky indies fast.

However: Turmoil BAD! That's going to absolutely MAUL your economy, reducing your ability to churn out priests like they're on sale.

3)I use the normal starting fortress because it is cheap and quick to build so I can protect blood hunters and sacrificers.

I love the watchtower, too. Gotta protect those blood hunters, temples, magic sites, vulnerable exposed provinces. Bloody pesky raiders.

Lord of Night is chosen to sneak nearest high population province by second turn and start assassinating commanders. I then use scouts on retreat to attack the province twice; once to see how many commanders exactly I need to assassinate and then second to take over the province on the Last assassination attempt since the attempt will take place before normal combat. Assassinations are slow going so any cutting on time corners is essential.

Assassination is very slow going. Although there's basically nothing in the way of an indy commander that can possibly stand up to the freaking Lord of the Night, this is definitely a horribly slow way of expanding.

While certainly acceptable in SP, this is probably a little too slow for competitive multiplayer. The Lord of the Night's fatigue is relatively modest, so in lightly populated provinces, with the magic paths you chose, you may be able to clear them out just by buffing Mirror/Mist/Ironskin/Attack Rear. Your paths aren't quite optimized for battle performance, though.